Completely natural.

Completely natural.

cargo_cult/oases

As we move around the city, we see a multitude of common, mundane, mass-produced objects. Piles of newspapers, t-shirts, lighters, jeans… which blend into patterns, into entireties with or without meanings, piles the eye only glances at cursorily, looking for the one thing we need, or striving to forget the image as soon as possible. With exactly the opposite process of recording, instead of looking away, and therefore forgetting, Stojanović’s photographs, taken in unnamed cities in different parts of the world, take us back and remind us of the trivial existence and its inevitability which defies oblivion. The eye is resisting the truthfulness of these photographs not because they present scenes which are unreal or repulsive, but because they present what we are familiar with, what surrounds us, but what we overlook while we generalize the triviality of reality, constantly trying to make it better or at least bearable. This is a mass reality, while the hyper-production, allegedly motivated by real human needs, has long ago become its own goal, pledging for maintaining a system within the society of advanced capitalism.
When we speak about global hyper-production, we use the term as inadvertently as we would go over endless racks filled with goods which is same in Amsterdam, Ljubljana, Negotin or Casablanca, whose purpose we never fully understand and whose necessity we never question, because it has become so usual, “socialized” and naturalized that it seems unnecessary, or even futile to do so. On the other hand, when cargo contents, i.e. numerous plastic wigs, copies of branded sneakers and synthetic shirts or neatly stacked jumpers waiting for those they’re intended for, become subjects of photographs, we suddenly start treating them as wondrous. A feeling of cheap commodity fetish is created, a Camp of infatuation with worthless, an almost bizarre author’s passion for the ordinary in an extraordinary place, for multitude of copies instead of originals, for bad, redundant and ugly before the good, necessary and beautiful. However, the feeling is a trap, because what lies beneath these photographs is an impartial presence, an insistence on perceiving the reality without the usual mechanisms we use in an attempt to formulate the real, to represent it, to position it symbolically and determine it semantically.
The representation in each of the photographs of the cargo_cult series is directed only towards the representation of multitude, in a sense that multitude represents itself completely insensitive to the possibility of becoming something more. In this way, truthfulness is generated, the truth about the society we didn’t ask for, which we avoid facing and refuse to accept as our own, in which we exist and which we renew and continue. By giving up the privilege of being the wise explorer’s eye, a genius that sees what others cannot, the photographer’s eye becomes our eye, but the closed one. To be conscious, political or right, we must reject the superfluous, false, cheap and toxic, and that is the one thing cargo_cult doesn’t allow us to do, by focusing on and normalizing the distracting and the marginalized from reality.
Stojanović deals with nature in oases series in exactly the same way he approaches the artificial, the goods, i.e. machine or hand-made artifacts. Natural scenes mediated by (re)production are found in eleven photographs, while one contains a real landscape. The expected nature, i.e. nature in it non-mediated form doesn’t exist, and what’s left of it are idealized notions and productional aesthetic requirements for what real, unadulterated nature should look like. By photographing new, created (not given) landscapes, images of nature which appear inside a society on facades and buses, as vignettes or decorative elements in homes, Stojanović reaches the concept of oases, the sad tropes of a capitalist fantasy about the prehistoric stage of Nature which doesn’t exist anywhere in its pure form and is impossible to adequately reconstruct or represent. In oases, Adorno’s “second nature” isn’t just modified by human knowledge and actions, but also by new processes of production which are, paradoxically, motivated by the quest for the first, “real” Nature, nature as itself, which has been destroyed and is again getting lost in the field of complete abstraction, only appearing before us as a much deformed cultural memory of what nature is (was) and what it should be.
Through oases, by recording the society, Stojanović also records nature and thus detects the modern society’s need to reconstruct and recreate Nature, but at the same time, he perceives the internal conflict of that need. In fact, the reinvention of Nature (as is the case with tradition, past or nostalgia after all) isn’t motivated by a primordial want, or by a poetic individual’s wish for uniting with nature, the search for the truth, pureness, or even escapism; it is a need to justify and legitimize Society with nature which exists or used to exist per se, marking the zero point, the primal state, the sublime fact and the absolute of neutrality. Nature doesn’t need humans, but humans, and especially the capitalist society, need Nature in order to establish and sustain the order they insist upon, which is based on often incomprehensible strong and inexplicable laws of nature. Although they look like a pair of opposites at first sight, the motifs of nature in society – the foil with a pattern of forest or a mountain glade on an office building glass, or a deer peacefully grazing on the left wing of the city bus’s chassis – are where they belong, perfectly doing their function, convincing us that going to work, accumulating wealth or humbly and politely using the civilization’s attainments such as public transport, are completely natural, real and inevitable like sunset and sunrise.
Oases unmistakably uncovers (discovers) and exposes the civilizations aspiration to come closer to the naturalness of nature, the aspiration which unveils itself solely through society, the society of liberal capitalism and its laws. When, on the final photograph of the oases series named “Man in a Natural Habitat” (taken in national park Tangier in Morocco), Man finally appears, directly present in nature, the image feels repulsive, artificial, incomplete, facing us with our need to binary juxtapose Nature and Society, the two realities excluding each other, but existing simultaneously. The natural habitat is no longer nature, and our inability to perceive Society as natural and Nature as “socialized” and cultural puts nature into an abstract and perfectly complete world of fantasy for eternity, into an oasis, where the presence of a real everyday man makes for a mistake, a glitch and an excess.
Marko Stojanović’s approach in cargo_cult and oases series aestheticizes, with photographic precision, professionalism and inexorability, the melancholy of glistening and shiny surfaces of advertising and decorative images of nature, the solitude of endless amounts of objects waiting for a proprietor to invent them through ownership, the neglect of souvenirs or the chipped visions of something which is supposed to be ideal. This approach makes a turn in relation to reality we are deeply immersed in and generates affect instead of objective insight. The inanimate world of cargos and artificial oases acquires human qualities despite the persistent absence of Humans who announce themselves through them, both as a cause and an effect. Although the two series of photographs represent two key pillars of capitalism – mass hyper-production and tendency to identify itself through the laws of nature, they do not do it in an ironic, derisive manner, but they resist giving judgements on these social processes. Instead, they make them invisible and leave space for spectators to face the absurdity of social reality in which they are participants, as is the author himself. And in this free, unmarked space of confusing and contradictory affects that these images invoke in spectators, lies the space for (self)reflection, critical deliberation on society and generating of politics.
Marija Ratković
Translation: Željko Maksimović